The Challenge of Living Between Two Worlds

Movies and TV shows have perpetuated images of psychics as stereotypical outcasts, oddballs, and even dangerous individuals living on the fringes of society, sometimes proving to be liars working their magic to hustle people out of money. And while over time this representation has improved to some extent, like a steady drip of advertising, these kinds of beliefs are so ingrained that they have continued from one generation to the next without us even consciously being aware of it.

In light of all this, it’s understandable that you might want to keep your inner world a secret. Of course you don’t want to be seen as a liar, as mentally unwell, or as dangerous just for being who and what you are. Of course you don’t want to feel criticized for exploring your spiritual inspirations. Of course you don’t want what feels fascinating, inspiring, and authentic to be marred by the negative judgments of others or to have what you experience as divine to be perceived as something evil.

Keeping our abilities a secret seems especially necessary when we feel like we haven’t yet established a secure support system of people who understand or are at least open to learning about this side of us. Keep your secrets. Let your inner world blossom at its own pace. Within these pages there is no judgment, only support and encouragement for you to continue to grow.

“How do I exist in one place when part of my heart feels like it’s in another place too?” Pam asked me. When you’re drawn to follow this calling of Spirit, at some point it’s bound to leave you feeling as though you’re living between two worlds. Part of this just takes getting used to. The more you learn to tune in, the more it will just feel like a natural sense. Say you’re in the middle of a work meeting or are at the grocery store and the delicious smell of food cooking wafts its way to you. This sense of smell doesn’t turn off your other forms of awareness. You can smell this wonderful scent and still keep your attention on the meeting at hand or on the surroundings of the grocery store, even if you’re a bit distracted. So it is with the pull of intuition. Say you’re in that meeting and you feel the tap of intuition.

You can tune in to that internal message while remaining aware of the space around you. It may feel odd at first, but with practice you’ll get the hang of being equally in both worlds at once.

On the other hand, say you’ve just gone through a very intense experience in one of your meditations. It felt profound, and as you start to go back to your daily routine, you feel like part of you is still off on a spiritual exploration. Your mind is distracted as you contemplate the details of what you saw and heard. In this case, trying to get back into the motions of the physical world might end up feeling unnatural, as though you’re split between two different realms.

Yet another form of this “living in two worlds” feeling is the potential juxtaposition of your past versus where you feel the call of Spirit is leading you in the present. This can bring up some emotional challenges. Commonly this includes grief over what you feel you need to let go of that’s no longer a fit for you, fear over what might happen as a result of being true to yourself, and sadness over your sense of isolation from others who you don’t think will understand the changes you’re going through. As you feel yourself growing in a new direction, you might get the sense that you’re living dual lives, playing the role of your old self to appease your family and community while internally there’s a whole other side to you that no one even knows about.

I know this two-world’s juxtaposition and can still viscerally feel what it was like when it was at its peak for me. I was in my second year of college and had been part of one of the religious organizations on campus up to that point. I’d found friends there that I really liked, but every time I left a devotional meeting, I felt heavy and unsettled. I tried my best to ignore those feelings. I didn’t want to find out where they were coming from. I wanted to be good. I wanted to fit into the world that I’d always been told was right. Why didn’t this fit?

In the past I’d pulled at the threads of tradition that didn’t resonate with me while clinging to the bits that left me inspired. In this way I’d set up a kind of compromised patchwork to my spiritual life. But increasingly